That said, and allowing for columnar contrarianism, his latest essay is outrageous. He starts with an undeniable truth: that the next election is "hurtling towards us with the force of a wet sponge", and that contemporary politics has reduced voters to narcolepsy.

The diagnosis is spot on. But instead of a cure, we get a series of palliatives – palliatives, moreover, of the wackiest, most alternative, least scientific variety. Hari wants polling day to be made a national holiday, and voters to be paid Â£150 each for taking part in "juries" that quiz candidates and then deliberate. He wants opinion polls banned during the campaign, so to introduce an element of drama. (Amazing, isn't it, how Lefties still believe that governments have the power to control information?) Finally, he wants a mandatory levy added to student tuition fees for the purchase of a newspaper for every undergraduate. Well, he would, wouldn't he?

Alright, he's having a bit of fun to make his point. But behind his mini-manifesto is the perfectly serious assumption that the way to get people voting again is to make the act more jazzy. The same assumption lay behind the various wheezes with which Labour has sought to boost turnout over the past decade: postal votes and e-votes and telephone votes, ballot boxes in supermarkets, weekend polling. It lies, too, behind the periodic attempts to widen the franchise to 16-year-olds, felons, lunatics and foreigners. None of these things has had, or will have, any effect beyond slightly facilitating fraud.

The way to engage voters is not to make the physical act of casting your ballot easier. It is to make elections matter again. As things stand, voting is a decorative rather than functional activity. Whom you elect as your MP or councillor makes barely any difference. You want a dedicated police patrol in your village? Petition the Chief Constable. You worry your daughter won't be happy at the school she's been allocated? Take it up with the Local Education Authority. You're outraged that you can't get a drug you need, and which is freely available elsewhere? Go and moan at the NICE.

When I last blogged about the powerlessness of MPs, a couple of you responded to say how frustrating it was to write to your local representative, only to get a letter back saying that he had forwarded your complaint to the appropriate minister or agency. I can quite see that this must be maddening. But think about how frustrating it is for the MP, too, lacking any direct authority, reduced to petitioning a self-serving apparat on his constituents' behalf.

No, the way to get people voting again is to unbundle the quango state, to make office-holders directly vulnerable through the ballot box, to disperse power, to take decisions as closely as possible to the people they affect. As to how precisely to effect all this, it'll be in the book I'm co-authoring with Douglas Carswell, out next month.